Once Upon a Serene

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A short piece of flash fiction for your reading pleasure. On a serene day at a lake, paddleboarding took a shocking twist when a ghostly, bikini-clad beauty floated into view. EMS was called. Chaos and speculating bystanders were just the beginning.

So, I was meditating. All right, some would call it paddleboarding. But that’s where I can let my mind go limp. And, yeah, limp might not be the best word to use here. Let’s start over. 

Out to relax, spend time on our community lake, and get in a bit of exercise, that’s when it happened. Yeah, and you want to know about ‘it’. Pushy, pushy. Give me a sec. This is hard.

I found a body. Not any body. A serious babe in a colorful bikini—but dead-like, pale as a ghost. And face up. Near as I could tell, she was no one I knew. Somewhat submerged, she floated, her face and toes and other parts barely above the surface of the water, her limbs relaxed, long, dark hair spread out and floating, Medusa-like. Other than that, lifeless; I kept a distance.

When, from a cross-legged position in my board, I dialed 911, it wasn’t long before all hell broke loose. Yeah, that’s cliché. Get over it. 

From my vantage point a hundred yards away, I watched as a member of HOA security arrived at the marina. Then two sheriff’s deputies drove up. And then a frickin’ helicopter roared in. The copter hovered overhead, folks in flight suits and $10,000 helmets glaring down at me like I’d done the woman in. I mean, who kills someone and then sticks around to wait on emergency services? 

We floated. Me and this hottie. And the helicopter crew. The deputies and security guy held a short confab, then tramped to the shoreline. Talk about a clusterfuck. The helicopter’s down thrust frothing the lake’s surface, guys hollering from shore, someone donning a wetsuit—like the lake was frozen over—in August. Warm as bath water, I’d say.

Anyway, when the wetsuit made it to me, I point out the woman’s body and paddled my ass to shore, still sitting on the board. I’d seen little kids doing this, paddling with a six-foot paddle while seated at water level. Harder than it looks. 

The guy in the wetsuit pulled the woman’s body toward the boat ramp. I dragged my board from the water’s edge and sat on top of a picnic table, observing, wishing the copter would split. An EMT crew arrived in their ambulance. They strode to the boat ramp to wait. 

Apparently I wasn’t the only one to feel oppressed by the roaring helicopter. At the ramp’s edge, one of the EMTs motioned toward the helicopter and leaned into and yelled at a deputy. Looking upwards, this fella said something into a walkie-talkie and the copter suddenly tilted right and roared off as fast as it had arrived. God bless.

It might have been peaceful with that horrendous rotary-winged devil now gone, but, oh, hell no. As the ringing in my ears waned, a new hum caught my attention. I looked over my shoulder to see dozens of onlookers squeezing into the parking lot. Lots of familiar folks. Neighbors, people I’d come to know while out for a walk or on the lake, others I’d never seen before.

One old gal, in a pink sack dress that looked like she’d just snagged it from the dirty clothes hamper, elected herself spokesperson for this throng and came my way. Oh, God.

This old girl streamed out all sorts of speculations. Finally, she settled on who the dead man was, the guy who had killed him, and that they’d been at war over a barking dog, or some such shit. As she prattled on, my mouth fell open, my eyes locking on her jackhammering jaw. 

How do people do that? How in the whole wide world do folks think it’s okay to just make shit up? Stuff they have no damned idea about. She probably posted her news bulletin on social media before my feet had dried.

About then, another security member drove up, navigated through the milling crowd, parked, and climbed out of her car. I had seen her before; us always waving as she passed me on my walks. She was directed by a sheriff’s deputy to control the crowd, send folks home. After a first attempt at this rather impossible task, she came to stand beside my picnic table and shooed the nattering old woman away. Was that hard? Ha. Damn near impossible.

With hands on her equipment belt, and while staring back the growing crowd, she asked if I was okay. She actually cared about me, my feelings. We talked some, her advising me about the days ahead. This young woman, well, a few years younger than me, had missed her calling. Before long, my vision had blurred, and I was admitting that I wasn’t as strong as I’d thought I was. 

We continued to talk until a deputy came to take my statement. Just as he got started scribbling notes, an EMT rushed up the slight slope in our direction. Before he arrived, a man in bright blue swim trunks pushed through the crowd of onlookers and sprinted to our cadre. He was looking for his wife.

About to lose my shit, I eased off the picnic table and onto wobbly legs. 

A lot had been said that day. I don’t remember it all. But I’ll never forget what that EMT said. “We’ve got a pulse.”

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While sketching out the backstory and family history for Camino Child (my recent novel) and our lead character, Summer Darling, I wrote a novella about her grandmother when she was a young woman backpacking through Europe in the 1980s with her older sister. CLICK here to download your FREE copy of Georgia & Patricia.

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